Built by Lacoop Constructions
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones
Completed in 2023
CHAPTER Queensland
REGION Brisbane
CATEGORY Public Architecture
A relocatable, flexible structure made from shipping containers supports this country’s efforts toward a circular economy as well as the stripped back ethos of contemporary Australian circus. This project is the new headquarters for Australia’s largest youth circus organisation.
The project reflects the more pragmatic and industrial aesthetic of contemporary Australian circus, which rejects the artifice and costuming of traditional circus.
The building becomes an adaptable, adjustable circus apparatus which performers scale, climb, and swing from. It is a low-cost project that can be easily disassembled and relocated, throughout its life, like a modular circus tent.
The scheme uses twenty-eight shipping containers stacked four storeys high like large bricks to form an external perimeter wall around the 12m high practice and performance spaces.
The containers are the structural walls, the bracing and the insulation for the building and house spectator seating, sound and lighting, changerooms, offices, bathrooms, and storage areas.
On the south, one stack of containers is omitted revealing the full height and width of the training space to spectators in the parkland beyond.
